Choosing digital customer experience solutions isn’t easy for application development and delivery (AD&D) pros, or for their counterparts in the business. Tech pros used to respond to digital business needs by acquiring, say, a web content management or eCommerce system. They may have integrated other software tools to deliver extended capabilities. And it was good.

Fast forward to 2013, and the range of tools to support robust multichannel digital experience is wide and deep. Many different vendors are responding. A new Forrester report cites a number of their offerings as examples of emerging digital customer experience delivery platforms.

In our report, “Market Overview: Digital Customer Experience Delivery Platforms,” my colleague Mark Grannan and I offer Forrester’s view on this emerging market, the 14 tools and capabilities most needed for on-site experience delivery, and 17 example vendors who play in this space.

In our research, we discover some vendors provide more capabilities; some have fewer. Some build or buy most of their capabilities; others focus on integrating best of breed tools. All represent a range of companies attacking this market by answering a multitude of needs by IT and business customers all seeking to better address their customers through digital channels.

For this report, we identified four market segments plus representative vendors, including:

  • Web content management-centric platform vendors, such as Acquia, Adobe, Bridgeline Digital, Ektron, HP Autonomy, OpenText, SDL, Sitecore.
  • eCommerce-centric platforms, which expand upon their transactional foundations, such as Demandware, Digital River, and hybris (an SAP company).
  • Marketing-centric platforms (which include software vendors and services vendors that have created offerings on commercial systems), such as Hubspot, Razorfish, salesforce.com, and SapientNitro.
  • Enterprise Business-centric platforms, which combine front- and back-office capabilities, such as IBM and Oracle.

This Forrester Market Overview follows our earlier report, “TechRadar™ For AD&D Pros: Digital Customer Experience Technologies, Q3 2013,” which defined the tools and capabilities necessary for on-site experience delivery.

We’d love to hear from you. How is your team or your company delivering more capabilities for online digital experiences? Do you value a platform approach in which one vendor delivers most of these capabilities? Or are you satisfied making this an integration issue – sourcing the best tools and getting them to work together to support digital mandates? Let us know in the comments. And follow this space for more insight into this emerging market.